Air Algerie Flight 5017 Crash Investigation Continues: Both Black Boxes Found in Mali

United Nations peacekeeping specialists recovered the second black box from the wreckage of Air Algerie Flight AH5017 in northern Mali, the U.N. announced in a statement Saturday. Both black boxes have now been recovered from the site.

Air Algerie and Swiftair, which was operating the plane, said the flight was carrying 118 people from Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, to Algiers, Algeria, when it disappeared from radar just under an hour after takeoff and crashed in northern Mali, killing everyone onboard.

A multi-national investigation into the cause of the flight's demise led by France's Accident Investigation Bureau is currently ongoing. Data from the black boxes should help determine whether or not inclement weather in the area caused the plane to crash.

According to Burkina Faso and French government officials, the plane's pilot radioed in to air traffic controllers in Niger in order to change course and avoid weather in the area just before its disappearance.

"Satellite images showed strong thunderstorm activity just north of Ouagadougou at the reported time of the incident," said weather.com meteorologist Nick Wiltgen. "The thunderstorms had been moving southwestward into that area for several hours, so in theory air traffic controllers would have been aware of them and adjusting flight paths accordingly."

The wreckage, a nearly unrecognizable tangle of blackened metal and other debris, is strewn about a 550 yard area of barren Malian terrain, complicating investigation and recovery efforts.

"It will be difficult to reconstitute the bodies of the victims," Burkina Faso Prime Minister Luc Adolphe Tiao said at a news conference. "The human remains are so scattered."

But no one will know for sure what happened to the plane until a formal investigation is concluded. Fifty four of the 118 passengers and crew were French nationals, giving French President François Hollande great cause to find the truth behind the plane's destruction.

"There are hypotheses, notably weather-related, but we don't rule out anything because we want to know what happened," Hollande told the Associated Press. "What we know is that the debris is concentrated in a limited space, but it is too soon to draw conclusions."

The discovery of one of the plane's black boxes at the crash site should help those investigations. The first black box was found Friday by one of the legion of French soldiers who first arrived at the scene Friday.

There are still lingering concerns that the plane — especially on the heels of the demise of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 — could've been shot down in the war torn country of Mali. French troops are currently engaged in a conflict with Islamic extremists in the region.

Previously, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had warned airlines about flying over Mali at lower altitudes, citing the risk of "small-arms, rocket-propelled grenades, rockets and mortars and anti-aircraft fire, to include shoulder-fired, man-portable air defense systems" in the region.

However, French officials told the Associated Press that adversarial forces in Mali didn't possess the firepower to shoot down a commercial jet at cruising altitude.

There is also speculation that plane itself could've played a role in the crash.

According to the Associated Press, the plane was a McDonnell Douglas MD-83—a twin-engine, long-range jet. Swiftair said they acquired the plane, which was built in 1996, in 2012. Before that, the plane reportedly spent nearly 10 months unused in storage, but has logged more than 37,800 hours of flight time and more than 32,100 takeoffs and landings.